Naming and Necessity
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| Naming and Necessity | |
| Author | Saul A. Kripke |
|---|---|
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of language |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press, Blackwell |
| Publication date | 1980 |
| Media type | Hardback and Paperback |
| Pages | 184 |
| ISBN | ISBN 9780674598454 ISBN10: 0674598458 |
Naming and Necessity is a book by the philosopher Saul Kripke that was first published in 1980. The book is based on a transcript of three lectures given at Princeton University in 1970.[1]
Contents |
[edit] History of Naming and Necessity
A series of articles based on transcripts of the lectures was published prior to the publication of the lectures as a book:
- 1972, 'Naming and Necessity' appeared in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman's edited book, Semantics of Natural Language
- 1977, 'Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference' was included in Midwest Studies in Philosophy
- 1979, 'A Puzzle about Belief' was published in Avishai Margalit's edited book, Meaning and Use
[edit] Overview
Language is a primary concern of analytic philosophers, particularly the use of language to express and discuss concepts, which are taken to be abstractions from perceptions of the experienced "real" world. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke considers several questions that are important within analytic philosophy:
- How do names refer to things in the world (the problem of intentionality)?
- Are all statements that can be known a priori, necessarily true, and all statements that are known a posteriori (or empirically), contingently true?
- Do objects (including people) have any essential properties?
- What is the nature of identity?
- How do natural kind terms refer and what do natural kind terms mean?
It has been argued that some of the ideas in Naming & Necessity were first exposited (at least in part) by Ruth Barcan Marcus. Quentin Smith of Western Michigan University has been the chief expositor of this argument[2]. Kripke is alleged to have misunderstood Marcus' ideas during a 1969 lecture which he attended (based on the questions he asked), and attributed these ideas to himself when he later arrived at the same (or similar) conclusions. This view is controversial.
[edit] Lecture I: January 20, 1970
Kripke's main goals in this first lecture are to explain and critique the existing philosophical opinions on the way that names work.
In the mid-20th century, the most significant philosophical theory about the nature of names and naming was a theory of Gottlob Frege's that had been developed by Bertrand Russell, the descriptivist theory of names, which was sometimes known as the 'Frege-Russell description theory'. Before Kripke gave his 'Naming and Necessity' lectures, a number of criticisms of this descriptivist theory had been published by leading philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle and Peter Strawson. However, Kripke believed that the existing arguments against the Frege-Russell descriptive theory of names failed to identify the real problems with the theory.
[edit] Lecture II: January 22, 1970
In 'Lecture II', Kripke reconsiders the cluster theory of names and argues for his own position on the nature of reference, a position that contributed to the development of the causal theory of reference.
[edit] Lecture III: January 29, 1970
In 'Lecture III', Kripke discusses natural kinds, develops the distinction between epistemic and metaphysical necessity, and discusses the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind.
[edit] Importance
Naming and Necessity is generally regarded as one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy. In Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning, author Scott Soames wrote:
In the philosophy of language, Naming and Necessity is among the most important works ever, ranking with the classical work of Frege in the late nineteenth century, and of Russell, Tarski and Wittgenstein in the first half of the twentieth century . . . Naming and Necessity played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language.[3]
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press: 22.
- ^ Smith, Quentin. Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of The New Theory of Reference, Synthese, Volume 104, No. 2, August 1995, pp. 179-189.
- ^ Soames, Scott. 2005. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning. Princeton University Press. Cited in Byrne, Alex and Hall, Ned. 2004. 'Necessary Truths'. Boston Review October/November 2004. [1]
[edit] References
- Anscombe, Elizabeth. 1957. Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Byrne, Alex and Hall, Ned. 2004. 'Necessary Truths'. Boston Review October/November 2004. [2]
- Kripke, Saul. 1972. 'Naming and Necessity'. In Davidson, Donald and Harman, Gilbert, eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel: 253-355, 763-769.
- Kripke, Saul. 1977. 'Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference'. In Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 2: 255-276.
- Kripke, Saul. 1979. 'A Puzzle about Belief'. In Margalit, Avishai, ed., Meaning and Use. Dordrecht: Reidel: 239-283.
- Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Searle, John. R. 1958. 'Proper Names'. Mind 67: 166-73.
- Soames, Scott. 2002. Beyond Rigidity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Soames, Scott. 2005. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning. Princeton University Press.
- Strawson, Peter. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Routledge.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Anscombe, G. E. M., (transl.). MacMillan.
